Utopians never stop believing. Hence the organization still goes on today in it’s hundredth year even though it was born in a way that guaranteed failure. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
This stamp from the interwar years shows the Brutalist structure built along Lake Geneva to house the International Labor Organization. The organization was intended to standardize labor practices at a high level across countries. A tall order and clearly something that rose from the socialist workers movement. As such, a brutalist building is a must, and this stamp does a good job of showing the building in its best light.
Todays stamp is issue A63, a 20 Centimes stamp issued by Switzerland on May 2nd, 1938. It was a four stamp issue celebrating the new League of Nations buildings in Geneva. I covered the Palace of Justice stamp here, https://the-philatelist.com/2017/11/07/the-league-gets-a-palace-but-so-late-they-just-leave-it-empty/ . According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents.
World War I had seen Europe devastated. There was wide agreement across countries that there should be a new set of standards for the working person post war. The Second International Socialist Movement had excluded the movements earlier association with anarchists and now was in a better situation to suggest improvements for workers. Among them were no child labor, an eight hour work day, a minimum living wage, right to organize, and equal pay for equal work for women. All sensible demands that would be enacted and enforced by the League. At the time there were still worldwide European Empires so the European countries could by extension set the standard worldwide.
That is until the USA got involved. The USA sent labor leader Samuel Gompers to negotiate and his position was to water down the standards. Gompers was a Jewish immigrant from Britain and Netherlands who entered the labor movement from cigar making in New York City’s lower east side. That sounds like someone who would fit in well with the European Socialist movement. Gompers differed from them in several ways. He thought the movement should be particularly about the worker represented and less about a wider class struggle. He also worried that the international standards would act as a maximum as well as a minimum standard. Through Gompers intervention the standards were watered down and had no enforcement mechanism. The USA after fundamentally changing it, actually refused to join the organization until 1934.
Post war the organization continues under the United Nations and employs 2700 people. It also operates a training program in partnership with a University in Turin, Italy. The organization keeps statistics and sets goals but is ever hampered by having no enforcement capability and now with so many small, poor countries to deal with.
It is fun to imagine if the organization had worked as intended. The high standards would have lead to a high cost of labor that would have been fairly uniform across countries. This would probably reduced international trade but at the same time reduced economic dislocations that come from profit seeking capitalists seeking out ever cheaper labor. It also would have been interesting to see how it would have coped with decolonization. It may have surprisingly found itself in favor of continued colonial status in order to maintain the hard fought standards. This then might have prevented the increase in migrant workers as they often are seeking countries where their labor will be more valued.
Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast the architects of brutalism. Imposing socialism from above was going to be a tall order. The architects gave them a building, that while not beautiful, leaves you imagining the people within are capable of accomplishing it. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting